1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to business service management. More specifically, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and computer program product for dynamic specification of a business value by a discovered resource.
2. Background Art
Currently, in the field of business service management there is a subfield, entitled discovery. Discovery is often deployed amongst Information Technology (IT) systems.
In discovery, typically one, or more, types of monitoring software, of middleware, is used to monitor and evaluate various elements, or resources, of an enterprise's IT system including hardware, software, and their relationships. This monitoring, or “viewing”, is typically done from the outside looking in. That is the discovery process is conducted wherein a person, or entity, starts with an entire, “macro” view of the IT system, business system, or the like; and, then starts “drilling” down (e.g., analyzing) from the “top” and proceeding downward towards smaller and smaller sub-entities, or resources (e.g., “top-down” analysis).
Typically, in discovery, various resources are “manually” grouped together to form a business unit. The business unit, or business system, is given an arbitrary value by the person, or entity, conducting discovery. This value to the business system may be used later on, if and when there is a failure.
For example, if there is concurrent failure in more than one business system, these arbitrary values are typically applied as the determinant on which business system should be worked on, or corrected, first (i.e., prioritization).
There is currently no way for the various resources to provide their own value as they are deployed into a system, or more than one system. There is a lack of standardization in discovery. Information obtained in discovery is later used to determine business impact of a failure, for example. Currently, business value is provided by the process which defines the elements of the business system, and not by the resource(s) therein.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a method, apparatus, and computer program product for dynamic specification of a business value by a discovered resource.